Limiting Filters to Specific Values with Background Filters

As a designer, you can define which of the fields in a filter will be visible to viewers. After defining which fields will be included in the filter, viewers will be able to use the updated and restricted filter to further filter the dashboard or widget using the available fields.

This can be useful in cases where viewers only require selected data, and then they do not have to search through a long list of fields, or for security purposes in cases where you do not want to expose all the data.

Example 1 – Simple list filter
A filter includes a list of 10 countries. As a designer, you can limit the filter to include only five specified countries. Viewers will see the filter as having only five countries to include or exclude in the filter.

Example 2 – Conditional filter

Another example requires having only the top 5 countries by population included in the available list of countries. In this case, viewers will only see five countries, however, the list of countries will depend on the population sizes and any changes that may affect which countries are in the top 5 at the given time.

To create a background filter:

Create a background filter using one of the following methods:

In a filter without selected values, open the filter’s menu and click Create background filter. Define your filter settings, and click OK.
or

If you made changes to your filter (either by editing the filter or by selecting values directly in the filter), you can open the filter’s menu, and click Set as background filter.